Various types of telemonitoring systems for keeping track of patient health conditions are known. These include U.S. Pat. No. 6,402,691 B1 entitled In-home Patient Monitoring System issued Jun. 11, 2002, Published application No. 2006/0285651 A1 entitled Monitoring System With Speech Recognition published Dec. 21, 2006, No. 2007/0004970 A1 entitled Trend Monitoring System With Multiple Access Levels published Jan. 4, 2007, and No. 2007/0024439A1 entitled Monitoring System for a Residence published Feb. 1, 2007. All of the above have been acquired or assigned to the Assignee hereof and are incorporated by reference.
Monitoring systems, as noted above, benefit from periodic updates to add or support new features, fix software problems or add additional media content. A convenient and cost effective way to implement such upgrades is to use an upgrade server, which might be displaced from the respective monitors, which periodically downloads the upgrade.
Where thousands of monitors are seeking upgrades, server overloads or slowdowns in service can result. There is thus a continuing need to be able to provide large numbers of upgrades to remote sites requesting same without causing service slowdowns or system crashes.
It would also be desirable to find a way to avoid the above noted problems without requiring hardware upgrades and which might be incorporated into a firmware upgrade of existing monitors.